J7? THE A "-.... -.,.. / . ,I . . : j " g m -:;- /" 'í'/ , .. .;---- _" :: nu /i\\h . 0 .. 0 ..... 0 0 . . ..,. THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT THE NEXT ACT ".. n_ ......,. o -.:.- , \:t ;l ú o G C 0 T he singular achievement of post- Soviet Russia is freedom of ex- pression. Its fruits are a glorious thing. Where once television broadcast bogus reports on the grain harvests of the steppe, there is now a version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" in the lan- guage of Pushkin. On Saturday nights at eleven, a Moscow channel presents "The Naked Truth," featuring one Svet1ana Pesotskaya, who reads the news fully clothed and then strips down to her brassiere to announce the sports. (A team of topless strippers does the weather.) Anyone can report anything, print anything, say anything. The newspapers are filled with stock tips and personal ads (Lonely S & M nihilist, 38, seeks her Raskolnikov. Car a must). The sole danger to serious lit- erature now is not censorship but, rather, the danger it faces everywhere: indifference. And, oh yes, te1evision- :::I especially the independent channel, w 8 NTV-delivers ambitious and often blistering reports on the Russian gov- Q ernment, and never more so than dur- ing the tragic affair of the subma- 8 rine Kursk. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and his top advisers responded to the Kursk affair WIth purely Soviet re- flexes These were the same reflexes that led the Politburo, in 1986, to yank a cur- tain down around the Chernoby1 nu- clear disaster. In both cases, the leader- ship cared only for itse as if by ignoring the problem, by making it a secret, by minimizing it, it would somehow go away. But while Chernoby1 became a global issue only after outsiders, the Swedes, began to register dangerous levels of radioactive drift, the fate of the Kursk became known to the world mainly through the Russian press. The longer Putin stayed on vacation and ig- nored the public outcries and the West- ern offers of aid, the tougher the cover- age grew. Russia is a great country for meta- phor, and so last week, when the Ostan- kino television tower burst into flames and smoldered over the Moscow sky- Vladimir Putin line, one could understand the obsessive search for meaning. Was this a kind of memorial torch for the men of the Kursk? Was the fire the ultimate sign of Russiàs weakness and deterioration? Or was it something just as ominous, a harbinger of an imminent govern- ment assault on that precious thing the free press? Even Boris Ye1tsin's harshest critics would have to concede that, through it all, he held true to precisely two prin- ciples The first was his absolute hatred for the Communist Par As President, he would never countenance a compro- mise, much less a coalition, with the Communists. The second was his com- mitment to a free press. It is true that the businessmen who control the Russian media practically carried the moribund Ye1tsin to reë1ection in 1996, but those same outlets were often brutally critical of him. There was never a sense that censorship was returning. All that has changed under Vladimir Putin. As President, he has shown him- self ready to form coalitions with the Communists when it suits his needs, and his resentment of the press is pal- pable. When he found time, at last, to meet with families mourning the men lost on the Kursk, he lashed out at the media for "robbing the country, the Army, and the Navy." Putin has been particularly infuriated by NTV's forth- right coverage of the ongoing war in Chechnya; in May, his government raided NTV's headquarters and jailed its chairman, Vladimir Gusinsky, for THE NEW YOR.KER, SEPTEMBER. 11, 2000 35